[LLVMdev] LLVM capability question.

[Michael T. Richter]

I'm losing my sanity, so I thought I'd try and generate an LLVM target
for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC).  In talking to some of the
people in the GHC mailing list some issues have come up that I can't
find a ready answer to.  (Others came up that I could, so I don't feel
quite as stupid or helpless as I could.)


     1. Is there any way to hint that a global pointer variable should
        be put in a register when further translated to some native form
        of code?  This is specifically necessary, apparently, for the
        current stack and heap pointers in GHC for speed reasons.
     2. This I'm just going to quote: "With (almost) every chunk of
        code, we want to associate a smal chunk of data (the "info
        table") which contains information used by the garbage collector
        and other parts of the run time system. We want to use only one
        pointer to point to both of those things, and we don't want to
        waste time with any additional indirections, so we make the
        pointer point between the data chunk and the code chunk."  I've
        asked for clarification on this from the original author, but I
        suspect it's something like having a pointer to code base that
        uses negative offsets to associated data (like some C++
        implementations use for the vtable).
     3. What is the actual support for tail calls?  The docs are pretty
        vague on this point -- the "tail" keyword seems to "enable" tail
        call optimisation.  I'm not sure what that means.
     4. GHC relies an awful lot on having many, many, many "little
        stacks".  Is it possible to have lots of tiny stacks in LLVM's
        architecture, to switch between them easily, to check when they
        overflow and to automatically grow them when they exceed their
        bounds?


-- 
Michael T. Richter
Email: ttmrichter at gmail.com, mtr1966 at hotpop.com
MSN: ttmrichter at hotmail.com, mtr1966 at hotmail.com; YIM:
michael_richter_1966; AIM: YanJiahua1966; ICQ: 241960658; Jabber:
mtr1966 at jabber.cn

"To [the Chinese], all other people are barbarians." --The Dalai Lama
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